alt Hacker Newssomewhat off topic but i’ve thought about tapering like this, but i’ve got wondered where can one get a calibrated milligram scale? or perhaps it doesn’t matter too much.
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if the substance has good water solubility, you can do this by dilution, measuring volume, without a scale.
sertraline for instance: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/68617#section=Solu...
don't do this with medications with special coatings or other methods for controlling release (SR/XR/etc).
Relative precision is enough if you just want to get rid of pills
you get a pill cutter. I was recommended to get one to ease in
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=calibrated+milligram+scale
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They're common, cheap, and plenty of (recreational) drug dealers use them.
Would you be able to taper by stretching out dosages, take a pill every 25 hours instead of 24?
You can also do a volumetric taper if you don’t have an accurate milligram scale (and none of the ones on Amazon are accurate). Dissolve a larger, known amount of medicine in a known amount of water or propylene glycol, depending upon solubility of the medicine. Then dose the liquid by volume. For example, 1 gram of medicine in 1 liter of water = 1 mg per ml. You can easily dose even microgram amounts this way.
AWS Gemini-20 below $100
Or a precision one for $$$
All the other sub-$100 ones are mostly junk, with a few decent ones. But just get the Gemini-20
Maybe another option is to dilute it with water so that you can use regular kitchen scales.
You can also taper off by reducing dosage one day of the week at a time. Thats how I tapered off a 10mg Escitalopram prescription: every 4 weeks, I added another day of the week where I reduced my dosage by 5mg. Took about a year to fully taper off and had to pause for a month here and there to stabilize, but it was worth it.
However, it was equally important that I had a support structure & tools to replace what the SSRI was doing. For me that was mindfulness and therapy.